A headline last week, Boris Johnston pledged/signed the UK to get rid of gasoline cars in the next 10-years.
Now, potentially, I am on board with the development of electric cars to stop reduction of emissions and climate change. In theory, if climate change exists and to an extent where it can immediately and negatively affect the human population, we should do what we can to stop it.
Cue, the electric car/vehicle. Here are the issues with electric on our current system. If we were to replace every gas car with an electric/hybrid car, there is not the infrastructure/powerplant in any city to feasibly implement. Then there is the fact that if this hurdle were to be passed the next question would be great, we have 100mm vehicles not producing emissions, but the powerplants required would need to be greatly increased: more coal power, more oil power, etc. No real net gain/loss in carbon footprint.
This is where renewables come in. The majority of the US now says that well..."we should now change to solar or wind". THERE IS A HUGE PROBLEM.
Petroleum Energy Density A single gallon of gasoline contains approximately forty megajoules of chemical energy. Dividing energy by volume yields an energy density of ten billion joules per cubic meter. Gasoline is ten quadrillion times more energy-dense than solar radiation, one billion times more energy-dense than wind and water power, and ten million times more energy-dense than human power. '
Table 1 Energy density Source Joules per cubic meter
Solar 0.0000015
Geothermal 0.05
Wind at 10 mph (5m/s) 7
Tidal water 0.5–50
Human 1,000
Oil 45,000,000,000
Gasoline 10,000,000,000
Automobile occupied (5800 lbs) 40,000,000
Automobile unoccupied (5000 lbs)
40,000,000
Natural gas 40,000,000
The output require by solar or wind to make up energy by density is LUDACRISOULY HUGE. We can't bridge that gap yet. The best hopes are to make more efficient combustion engines, but not even counting the huge issues with battery technology, we are worlds apart.
Oh Nuclear is 10 billion times more energy dense than petroleum. It makes petrol look like geothermal on the above.
Most certainly agree. Energy production and the storage of it by renewable sources are in theory better, but they are much more difficult to collect, store and release. Nuclear energy is clean enough energy that is dense enough but much of the western world seems to heavily oppose it thinking it isn't clean. Japan has many nuclear plants, but when the big earthquake struck in March 2011 most of the plants had to be shutdown due to instability. Many are just now coming back online, but during that time Japan went to rely on a non-renewable, liquified natural gas to help generate electricity.
Internal combustion engines have continually become more and more efficient over the years as much as people don't want to believe it. V8 engines in fact are less and less common, trucks and SUVs that once had them about 10 years ago are now outfitted with more efficient 4 cylinder engines that can pump out serious power while achieving better fuel economy. Electric cars still emit a lot of carbon at the front end of the process so even if we got to a point where the energy production was clean enough, it's hard to say if we'd actually be better. The production process emits about 3 times as much carbon as an ICE car, batteries are still using non-renewables, energy density of the battery is still an issue affecting the design and performance, and lastly the disposal process is still undergoing research if any of those components can be better recycled. Many parts on an ICE can be recycled by comparison. Let's also not forget the price tag, most good electric cars are well $50,000 and up, and that, in my opinion, better reflects the current supply chain for electric car production. I will say it has a chance to improve, but I think that is going to come from research on battery efficiency
Hybrids are really the best option. A good blend of the two, offering efficiency and no range anxiety especially with plug-ins where you can operate on electricity exclusively for a short 30 to 40 mile range.
I'm curious though why Johnson thinks this is a good idea as opposed to better investing in more public transit projects that move people around. I mean Europe has a greater density of people per square mile than the US does, why not put money towards that? You'll have less cars emitting carbon and less traffic at the same time. Maybe he feels inspired by Norway's model of heavily subsidizing ownership of electric cars? At the same time though, a huge majority of their electricity is generated by hydropower, so it makes sense for them.
In principle, I am a fan of nuclear power. It provides excellent reliability 'baseline' power that is essentially emission free. It is not without problems though:
Honestly, I'd argue that more electric cars could actually reduce demand for nuclear. Once installed the power from renewables is essentially free. The thing is that the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow. When that happens I still want my MTV. (please don't actually watch that channel, btw but I'll take the money for nothin and chicks for free) Allowing both charging and supplying could help fix that without requiring much additional infrastructure. People with solar roofs already frequently have meters that enable them to sell power back to the grid.
In that situation nuclear's long spin-up spin-down cycle is a huge liability, since remaining demand is likely to be for 'peaker' plants to fill in gaps in supply which likely means nat gas since it has the quickest on/off cycle. There are other ideas like pumped hydro, but that requires a lot of construction.
Also, CRE, what's the source for this table? I find a lot of red flags in it (gasoline 20% the energy of oil? Comparing energy density of a consumable vs. an essentially infinite source[solar]) I don't want to rip it apart until I know it better, but my bullshit detector is screaming "bad use of data."
The cost analysis really isn't a valid argument. Mostly becuase much of the cost is due to high regulatory costs. While on the flipside wind and solar have extreme levels of subsidy that reduce the cost per MW. Also the cost per mw is usually really poorly calculated as it is often calculated a peak output cost. Now I am not saying that grid level project developers calculate it this way but that is the numbers that are used on the marketing material that drives public adoption.
Now onto the cars, if we can create battey storage levels that are high enough to cover ~ 70% of winter night time energy consumption, allow people to drive to and from work, and recharge during the course of the work day the vehicles themselves can be used as the grid level battey storage. This will radically transform the viability of the electric vehicle.
Generation is a generational or longer transformation. The problem is always storage, we shouldn't be worried about building grid scale storage, we should be looking at improving battey tech to improve storage density, longevity, and charge rate. With these things the vehicles themselves can be used to stabilize and power the grid.
In addition to power source, battery technology definitely needs to improve as well. I agree that nuclear is the way forward, but all, if not most, of our batteries are currently lithium based and really taxing on the environment to mine and dispose of, not to mention how inefficient they are compared to simply storing gas. Changes in public perception for nuclear energy will be huge, but it needs to be accompanied by dramatic changes in battery production and technology on the part of companies like Tesla or other high end EV producers. I’m pretty bullish on this whole idea, but it will probably take longer than most people expect.
What are you talking about? Chemical energy density can't be applied to everything, yes petroleum products are most chemically energy dense material that are economically viable, but you don't refer to solar or wind potential as a J/m^3 measurement, that makes no sense. What volume are you measuring over to get that number? Solar radiation is measured in w/m^2, since it's not static and you need a time dimension involved. The exergy in wind power is about mass flow and the kinetic energy related to that mass flow and is measured by 1/2*(v*t*rho*A)*v^2, which is just the kinetic energy (1/2mv^2) of the air and the v*t*rho*A is is the mass of a volumetric air flow over a certain period of time (also, wind is not static).
In 2017 the world consumed 117,000 TWh of energy so let's do some quick calculations.
Example 1: Conservative estimates of the total amount of wind energy that could be harvested is 80TW. Dividing total consumption by power production gives total hours of production needed, in this case 1,462 hours of full wind capacity, or just under 60 days. That means if we could harvest the 80TW of power that is theoretically possible it would only take 60 days to gather all the power needed for the whole year.
Example 2: The world averages 340W/m^2 in solar radiation. Again dividing consumption by production we get 344^12h*m^2. If we assume we generate solar energy during roughly 1/3 of the day, that gives us just about 3000 hours of production a year (365*24/3), and we see we need 114 billion m^2 to generate all that power, or roughly 1.1% of the area of the US. Given efficiency is lower than that, say 15%, you'd need closer to 7.7% of the area of the US, to power the whole world. And this is average radiation, in areas like the American SW, Tibetan plateau, and the Saharan desert the radiation is significantly higher, while places like Northern Canada and Siberia are much lower. You'd only need a fraction of the area I calculated above if you located it properly.
In terms of energy production, we are fine if we develop the infrastructure. The bigger issue you touched on, but are conflating with production, is energy storage. Batteries are good but there isn't enough available lithium in the world to currently product enough storage to handle the delta in consumption vs production.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance#Irradiance_on_Earth's_su…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power#Wind_energy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
Thanks for this!
I think that the inefficiencies in storage and transport are probably pretty significant as well. Power in the southwest can't easily charge a car in new England.
Anyways, do you see an economic situation like this playing out? Does some investor owned power company end up with vastly increased revenue due to electric cars?
Please make your equations more understandable. When you write v are you referring to Volume or velocity or Voltage? When you write A are you referring to Amplitude or Amps? Other than that, spot on analysis.
My apologies, I totally understand the confusion. V here is velocity and A is area (the volumetric flow rate is determined by velocity*area [m/s]*[m^2]=[m^3/s]).
My point wasn't to suggest replace all our power sources with one type of renewable, but to emphasize how the original post made zero sense. Not even like a "I disagree with them", their numbers just don't align with reality. It would be like if I wanted to compare the population of various counties by measuring their coastlines in grams.
I was using the solar and wind examples as ways of showing how to actually do the energy calculations, not through some weird Joule per cubic meter calculation.
Also, grid scale storage will likely be metal water based batteries or something more use case specific like that. For example stored compressed air is a great way of storing huge amounts of potential energy. Doesn't mean that it is very useful for driving cars. Each technology has a specific use case.
For those of you who are unaware water metal batteries work on a rusting process. Basically as rust is created in a solution the metal leaches electrons that pass through a membrane to mate up with electron light atoms on the other side of the membrane. To store energy you release the electrons and force them back across the membrane and they recombine with the metal to reverse the rusting process. Prototypes of this battery are about the size of a small car but it is expected to end up about the size of a washing machine. This is a valid solution for grid scale storage unlike putting a bunch of tesla batteries in a block to make a huge battery.
Once we figure out how to make electrolysis more efficient, we’ll be to build out renewables in remote places with ideal geographies for generation (eg the Sahara or deep-sea offshore wind) and combine those with existing pipeline infrastructure to transport energy (in hydrogen form) back to population centers. Can’t wait for the day - truly sci-fi.
I can't determine if you're a bot, a drunk or a moron. I can only forgive one of those three. 'Boris Johnston' isn't doing anything. It's Johnson, you fool, and it's in your first sentence. That's not a typo either. The 't' that doesn't belong isn't anywhere near the other adjacent letters in his surname on a keyboard. That leads me to believe you're a moron who doesn't know the surname of the British Prime Minister, though I can't rule out the other two.
Get your shit together before writing anything on a public forum you illiterate fuck.
We have an intelligent conversation about something investment related and you are critiquing the dude's spelling?
It's not even an intelligent conversation though, the entire argument is based on nonsensical "science". OP clearly has no understanding of the basics of energy production and thermodynamics. I agree critiquing the dude's spelling is dumb, but it's not like the original post had much going for it to begin with.
Stop posting while inebriated you orangutan. Your fucking moronic shitposts aren't welcome when the OP has initiated an interesting discussion.
smallest dog barks the loudest :)
I am generally pro nuclear, however there are a number of headwinds for this tech. Increasing use and subsidisation of renewables, which have 0 production costs once installed, drive the price of energy to 0. When renewables cannot fulfill the needs of the grid, peaker plants such as gas are economically viable to make up the demand. What does not fit in this ecosystem is a base load provider, especially one with exorbitant upfront construction costs that no-one wants to finance these days. In my opinion, the generation mix of the future will be renewables, some sort of storage functionality, and peaker plants to fill demand gaps when economically viable to do so. I think inflexible baseload provides, such as nuclear, are becoming priced out of the market.
The fallacy of the 0 ongoing cost of wind and solar is so widely believed it is shocking.
Then there is the fact that if this hurdle were to be passed the next question would be great, we have 100mm vehicles not producing emissions, but the powerplants required would need to be greatly increased: more coal power, more oil power, etc. No real net gain/loss in carbon footprint.
Can you source for this? The whole argument is predicated on the idea that power generation for electric cars is equally environmentally unfriendly as the equivalent amount of fossil fuels burned. The data I'm finding shows that gasoline burning vehicles contribute about 6.5x more CO2 into the atmosphere than all-electric vehicles. And even if all your math is correct, electric vehicles convert more of their stored energy into propulsion than do gasoline vehicles, by a factor of 3-4x, which means that even accounting for a higher energy payload of gasoline, it's less efficient (also, not sure how you're making a comparison between wind power and gasoline, since the relative densities are also absurd).
All of which is to say, the premise that burning coal or electricity to power electric vehicles is equally environmentally unfriendly as gasoline burning vehicles is patently untrue. Your remaining argument, while interesting and with some enlightening facts, breaks down under this basic problem.
https://www.drexel.edu/~/media/Files/greatworks/pdf_sum10/WK8_Layton_En…
Delete
I don't think we are 20 years away anymore. I follow nuclear fusion progress pretty closely and I think we're 5 years away from proof of concept (net positive energy). It will change everything.
Lol, we've been "5 years away" for the last thirty years.
Energy positive reactions is barely the first step. Also we have been 20 years away from that for 50 years.
I think people underestimate how quickly things change when the right incentives are there. As an example, a pretty run of the mill car in the US like a Subaru WRX now gets hit with a 20k euro emissions penalty in France, which effectively killed the current model. The market for cars is going to change at warp speed in Europe. The carbon border taxes they are discussing could profoundly reshape global supply chains if they have teeth.
Yes energy density is a problem, but we're on nigh 12 years of muddling along in the EU with either high unemployment or gig economy jobs masking the reality. Not unthinkable that Germany caves and the EU goes full-on green bonds bought by the ECB and you see a huge infrastructure and manufacturing boom.
electric cars don't work for the masses because of a shortage of supply of lithium and cobalt...required for the battery...so until we find a large supply....this is not feasible for mass production. Maybe if we mine that asteroid...or find fresh deposits....but until then, this is apipe dream. Also, since China is sitting on a majority of rare earth metals needed, this gives china enormous economic power over the electric car industry, and they know it, and they will use that power.
The EV skeptics are wrong on a fundamental point. While they are correct that EVs are not emissions-free (because powerplants have emissions), coal is the only electricity source that produces worse emissions than a gasoline engine. Every other source of energy--wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, natural gas, tidal, etc.--has lower CO2 emissions than gasoline. This reality is actually why China's move toward EVs is a pyrrhic victory for lower emissions advocates--while China builds its EV market it vastly increases its coal-fired plants each year. But in the West, unless you live in, like, West Virginia, your EV is going to be "cleaner" than an ICE vehicle.
Also, it's true that we do not have the infrastructure to snap our fingers today and have every car on the road become an EV. Fortunately, we are seeing a slow progression toward EVs, and not an overnight change, which hopefully gives us time to steadily improve the power grid.
Lastly, emissions are far down on my list for having an electric car. A well-engineered electric vehicle designed ground-up as an EV will just be a better car in virtually every respect than an ICE vehicle (handling, acceleration, convenience, maintenance, noise). If price is equal, buying an ICE car makes no sense for most people, and especially for those who have home garages.
I own a Zinc battery company for those who are interested in this subject. Our battery will be the bridge to store the oils that is mined (and prevent future oil/gas price crashes!). This battery compared to Li-ion or Lithium is ages apart. A zinc air battery can hold energy upwards of 10 years! And have more capacity to store more energy for big industrial or large scale power storage and consumption. We won't be able to instantly swap to EV but I promise you we will get there! And I believe people should stop fear mongering about nuclear plants explosion. Chernobyl and Fukushima was a level 1 nuclear power plant. We have level 4 now which is salt/sodium cooled and it risk of radiation is even lower than coal plants!
So, is your battery most applicable to grid storage (e.g., storing solar power for when it's needed at peak times) or is it most applicable to the vehicles itself for long-range batteries?
I love you but did you read the entire thing fully. You need bigger attention span man
What's so good about Nuclear Energy? The only advantage I see is that it provides clean power 24/7 unlike solar and wind.
It's more expensive and almost all from capital costs. Plant construction is risky and typically goes over budget and behind schedule. Ever since Three Mile Island it's not been economically viable to build them.
Drumpfy I love you too bro but FUCKING stop commenting on nuclear power plant explosion and fear mongering.
I'm not fear mongering. I said since TMI it hasn't been economically viable. 40% of nuclear plant cancellations were before the accident so the industry was already in trouble, then the accident combined with public fears and new regulations made it all but impossible to build new plants.
Really man? You chose Business Insider and came here to give your neural simulation of Chernobyl on Netflix replay?
This chart accounts for the market warping nature of regulation and subsidies. Also these prices for renewables only factors in actual production hours, which on average halves the cost of solar. When you account for this and remove the subsidies for solar your cost per mw is now higher than nuclear even with its outlandish regulatory costs baked in.
The entire idea of the green movement is a folly without nuclear power. Thorium salt reactors are the future, we just need regulators to quit sucking the collective cocks of the rest of the energy lobby and stop blocking it.
PTQ said what I was going to say [Drumpfy]
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